Relationship and Intimacy

“It wants to open itself, like the door of a little temple, so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed, and less yourself than part of everything.” The Leaf and the Cloud by Mary Oliver

We know what love and intimacy is, despite our many confusions and inability to describe it in all of its complexities and subtleties. We know how it feels to us when our heart-mind-body is open to intimate contact and we feel less a separate individual being and more a part of everything.

We long for it, we pray for it, we mourn it deeply when it goes away. And yet this longing or desire for intimacy is our guide and teacher.

Much of our human journey is played out between the tension of intense desire for intimate relationships and following where our heart leads us to equally intense contractions around our difficulties and challenges in being intimate.

There is so much sorrow and pain in the world due to an inability to meet and be in intimate relationship with ourselves, our friends and partners and the earth.

We can learn to be awake in new ways to our longing for intimacy and our difficulties and challenges. True intimacy calls for the ability to choose to relate in ways which are wholeness making. Key to this is knowing who is doing the choosing.

In Brenda’s work with clients and in her teachings and writings, she engages with the role of desire, ways we get lost in the trance of desire or deaden and cut off from desire, exploration of barriers to intimacy, attachment, difference, boundaries, images which stand in our way, conflicts we have around intimacy and so on, fullness and emptiness. Woven within this are also other central features of intimacy which include wonder, play, delight, creativity and laughter.

Her work focuses deeply upon who is choosing to show up in relationship, who is resistant to relationship and how to be with ourselves and others in ways which are loving, kind, compassionate and open for increasing levels of growth, expression and transformation.

Check Events for upcoming classes open to the public on Relationship and Intimacy.